Should we cancel our pet insurance.?

[Southlondoner88]

Looking for advice please, we have two rescue dogs, one we’ve had four years and she is about 6 or 7 and the other we really are not sure but say about 4 or 5, we have him two years.

The younger one has an old injury that we think he got from being hit by a car (before we got him). The vet thinks it healed by itself and he just gets in with it, he never shows pain but doesn’t like long walks, he runs and plays well and you’d have to really pull his leg for him to show any sign of pain. He’s been on gabapentin since we got him, we buy from the vet and it cost £40 per month, we claim this back with insurance every month so it’s really ‘free.’ Our other dog appears healthy, never had issues apart from colitis in the past.

Lifetime Insurance for both dogs costs nearly £90 pm, we use two different insurers because it was cheaper that way.

We’re about to buy a house and also TTC so I’m really considering cancelling the insurance as money is tight and will be even tighter as time goes on.

In all fairness is insurance even worth it? The younger dog with the injury can’t really be treated for anything. The vet told us if he gets arthritis (which is likely) his size will effect how he can be treated long term, he’s 37kg. If he ends up needing a leg amputated, he will probably be better off being put to sleep, that’s what the vet said (he did say it more politely).

They also both have bad anxiety and hate the vet to the point they won’t even go through the door of the vet, the vet comes outside the door to them so if they had something seriously wrong with them, what could the vet even do? It would be traumatising for them to have long term treatment and I’d worry they’d become aggressive.

The reason we took insurance out on them in the first place was because it seems to be the done thing in the UK, I’d never heard about it before in Ireland where I’m from and many of my relatives think we’re mad for paying for it. Also our dogs stay on leads so it limits their exposure to things that harm then (cars, scavenging).

Would you cancel insurance? I’m worried that if something happened then we’d need to use our credit cards or savings which wouldn’t be ideal or we’d have to put them down because we wouldn’t have money for treatment.

You generally can’t claim on a new policy within 14 days of taking it out

If you can’t afford £90/month for pet insurance how on earth can you afford a human, they’re quite expensive as time goes on

It's a gamble. I stopped the insurance on my dog when it hit over £70/month, never having claimed on it. He's 14 now, and did have mast cell tumour last year but caught early which cost £1200. If it had been at a stage requiring chemo I would not have put him through that, insurance or not, at that age.
I've never insured my younger (11) dog. I have cats too and I don't insure them.
But I could afford a vet bill if it came down to it.
In all the pets I or my parents have owned (about 17), I have once had to pay £750 after a cat was hit by a car, and one of my parent's dogs got cancer but was quite old and the vet said the treatment had no guarantee of success and would be painful and confusing for the dog. So I'm sure they paid a thousand or two in tests etc but in the end vet advised putting to sleep.
I've had a dog and two cats hit and killed by cars, the rest died from old age (other than the cancer one of my parent's ).

My cat had a terrible accident before his 1st bday - he is nearly 11 and the premiums l have paid up until now are still cheaper than the vets bills. Keep the insurance.

You would be crazy to cancel your insurance. My friend's dog damaged his knee and the bill was thousands. Then a few weeks ago he got something stuck in his throat, was £1700. Both covered by insurance. If you have this type money in savings, then cancel.

As our animals age, more things start to go wrong with their health. I have 2 cats, in the last 2 weeks both have needed vetinary care. One was emergency out of hours and the other was related to an ongoing health condition. I'm currently £1000 out of pocket expenses but will get the majority of this back once insurance is settled.

Don't cancel your insurance, its distressing enough when our pets are poorly but to have to worry about not having the money to give them proper care is unnecessary stress on top.

So it seems cancelling insurance would not be the best idea. It’s odd how it’s just not a thing in other countries, I have friends from all over Europe and it’s not a thing either, although I don’t think vet bills are as expensive in other countries so maybe that’s why. Thanks for the clarity, I think I’ll keep it for now.

Our last dog had cancer and used £££ in insurance money being operated on, I'm so glad I didn't have to consider pts for financial reasons.

Even my rescue rabbit cost £1k in vet fees (ended up being pts anyway) when he got sick in February. He was also insured so we paid fifty pounds excess I think.

Insurance has never paid off for me. Two dogs and two horses and it’s ridiculous how they squirm their way out of paying. My premium was recently doubled for my dog and at the same time the insurers told me they were no longer covering for two issues my dog had. I worked out (even allowing for an accident or a new illness) that the premiums I’d be paying amounted to more than their annual cap in payouts.

Many of my mates self-insure as pp described and that’s what I’ll be doing now.

With my horse they refused to pay for a very expensive suspensory ligament condition (amounting to more than 5,000 euros) on the grounds that he’d cut the same leg ten months earlier (required ten stitches… they reimbursed 60 euros out of a 120 euros bill) - “oh it’s all there in the small print on page 17 of the policy”.

Obviously, thinking about it, their business model depends on the majority of their clients paying in much more than they get back. So on the law of averages, you’re best off not insuring. If your situation can ever be described as average.

I would only cancel pet insurance under two circumstances

1. I have £10,000 in the bank I could drop on vets bills without really noticing it (lol)

1. The pet is already old and has a questionable quality of life, so anything major would result in PTS anyway.

Cancelling on relatively young animals because money is tight = massive no-no.

Insure.
you don’t want choices made about your pets life based on affordability. The price escalates so fast in an emergency you may be in a position where you have to stop treating before you really know the likelihood of a good outcome.

different if a pet is very old though

Yes it’s fair to say vets bills in France are lower. They don’t feel that low however! My dog has racked up many thousands ( at least 4000) for her elbows and even though she was insured, you got it - the insurers wouldn’t touch it.

A friend who has the same exclusion for her dog just gets her French husband to ring the insurers and shout. Then they pay up. I love my husband but if he could just be, occasionally, French and shouty it would be extremely useful.

Only cancel insurance if you do not plan to treat or diagnose your dog.

Diagnosis can cost hundreds or even thousands in some cases.

@shockthemonkey yes this what I’ve heard that some people have been really stung by pet insurance so that’s why I’m reconsidering.

Oh really @Heyhoherewegoagain? I was really hoping the extra 90 a month would cover our baby expenses, extra food and childcare costs. You’ve really enlightened me, we won’t try for a baby then.

Well, ultimately it's your choice but it depends whether you could forgive yourself if your dog needed basic surgery or treatment but you had to have them PTS instead because you couldn't afford it.

Because unfortunately that's the reality/

I pay £70 a month for a 11 year old cat and a 5 year old dog. The dog has never needed the insurance but the cat was run over 2 years ago and her treatment cost £5.5k altogether which the insurance paid for. She’s now developed a heart murmur and the insurance has recently covered an appointment and tests with a specialist cardiologist and she’s now on heart medications as a result of that appointment. The insurance is covering it all. The only reason I would stop is if she was already quite elderly and quality of life was deteriorating so we would never opt to treat any conditions that arose.

My perfectly healthy cat developed diabetes at 10. I only adopted him at about 5 and have so far rinsed the insurance company 😅

Even within the UK, it depends hugely where you live. I live in the South East, and have only ever cancelled insurance on an ageing dog where I know I would not put them through anything invasive for their own benefit, and I was prepared to pay out on anything minor.

Friends who live in far more rural areas seem to pay approximately 30% of what I pay here for largely comparable issues (i.e. a pyometra in a bitch). If I were in that situation, I might consider not insuring and just having Dogs Trust membership to give me third party cover.

As long as I don't feel I could comfortably cover a vet's bill of several thousand pounds (never LOL), I will always insure. I want any decisions I make on my pet's to be measured decisions based on the benefit to them, not on whether I can afford the bill.

I live in Ireland, have a dog and have pet insurance. I'm not sure why you don't think it's a thing over here. I only know one dog owner without it. Everyone else has it.

The way it's worked for us is that even with insurance we've had to pay out big bucks.

It is true that we've been able to pay, as we have savings. I suppose the harsh realisation I've come to is that if you're unlucky (like we were, four times), you'll need to be able to pay big bills even while insured.

But I don't know the financial situation of others and I might, if I couldn't be sure I could cover all eventualities, insure a new dog - but choose the dog carefully, and not go for any of the breeds with exclusions. That may rule out almost anything other than an indeterminate cross breed... but even in the case of my rescue, being labeled on his papers as "Labrador type" was enough to rule out hips and elbows for instance. He was not a pure breed at all...

My dog had a bad leg from when we got him and was on gabapentine his bills went up as he got older in the end we were paying £240 a month insurance and his bill was £260 a month obviously if he got other illnesses we wouldn't have been able to pay for treatment. Have you got a spare £10k?
Once you stop insurance it will be hard to get him covered for any issue they can vaguely link to his current condition.

We have third party cover through our house insurance.

We don't insure the dogs other than that. We do have savings we could use if we had to, and I reckon over 20+ years of dog ownership, owning an average of 2 dogs at a time, we've probably saved about 15k net in premiums (after subtracting a couple of operations, long term drugs for arthritis etc).

But we can only do this because a) we have the back-up of savings, b) would both draw the line at putting a dog through some things before other people might and c) we treat some injuries at home.

I daresay one day we'll have a young dog with a compound fracture after doing something stupid which will wipe out the savings....

That's a fair enough comment, Edith.

Sod's law applies!

We paid a fortune in insurance for our dogs and didn't claim yet as they have so far been hale and hearty.
Our oldest dog needed a scan at the very end of his life, he had an aggressive tumour. At his age, untreatable. By the time we paid the excess and co-contribution we would have had about £50 coming from the insurance, so didn't bother claiming. We'd have been better off putting the monthly amount into savings.

I've got 2 I've claimed for once and a pupper who has already cost the insurer £1200 at 14 months.

Personally I'm cautious, I'd rather have it and not need it although it would be sods law that I'd have a big expense and they'd get sick as that happened.